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This review paper on groundwater protection measures in South Africa focuses on the actual implementation of groundwater protection measures, in particular, the resource-directed measures (RDM) as described in Chapter 3 of the National Water Act (NWA). Significant catchment-wide implementation of RDM has taken place in a phased manner throughout various catchments since 2012. By 2015, approximately R380 million had been expended on the catchment-wide implementation of the water resource protection measures over a period of 15 years. Considerable effort went into refining the RDM methodology, taking into account the groundwater component of the overall resource. In this paper, we contend that RDM, in its present form, will not make a significant contribution to groundwater resource protection and security in the country. This is a major concern because the Groundwater Strategy of the Department of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation (DHSWS) had declared the protection of groundwater as a national priority. This paper also examines institutional and governance arrangements (or lack thereof) as well as providing recommendations to support the effective implementation of groundwater protection provisions as prescribed by South Africa's water legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

River rehabilitation projects are framed as water security interventions in South Africa. They aim to address water quality and water quantity issues, as well as to improve socio-ecological relationships. These projects acknowledge the value of capacity building and social learning in enhancing water security. However, they adopt different governance approaches and hence have different knowledge construction and capacity building outcomes. This paper employs a 'governmentality' framework to analyse the capacity development processes within three river rehabilitation projects in Durban, South Africa. The analysis revealed that the three projects, with their different governmentalities, produced different capacity development modalities, which are utilised to sustain 'the object of intervention' in each river rehabilitation project. However, despite these differences, information as the currency of action; the context or site of learning; the importance of building state-citizen relationships; and the need for bridges or intermediaries, emerged as common elements which support capacity building and knowledge sharing across all three projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa is a water scarce country with deteriorating water resources. Faced with tight fiscal and water resource constraints, water utilities would have to adopt technically efficient water management technologies to meet developmental socio-economic objectives of universal coverage, aligned to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 6. It is important to measure the technical efficiency of utilities as accurately as possible in order to inform policy. We do this by using a nonparametric method known as Data Envelopment Analysis to determine, measure, analyse and benchmark the technical efficiency of all water boards in South Africa. Our contribution to the literature is twofold: This is the first paper to model technical efficiency of water boards as utility suppliers and guardians of water services in South Africa, and second, we address the overand underestimation issues of technical efficiency measurement in the water sector. We do this by modelling one of the most pronounced negative externalities from water provision (water losses) as an undesirable output using the approach developed by You and Yan. We find, on average, technical efficiency of water boards is 49%, with only three of the nine water boards technically efficient. Six of the smaller water boards showed high levels of inefficiency with an inefficiency rate of 51%, which is equivalent to wastage in expenditure of R3.7 billion. Six water boards operate at increasing returns to scale and two are scale efficient. Only Rand and Sedibeng water boards exhibited decreasing returns to scale. Therefore, redirecting potential efficiency savings to optimal uses could result in technical and scale efficiency for the sector. Scale efficiency results seem to support larger regional water boards as small- to medium-sized water boards are scale inefficient with low technical efficiency. For example, Amatola Water (small water board) with an efficiency score of only 16% has a total expenditure of 18% of that of Umgeni (large water board), but sells only 6.7% of the quantity sold by Umgeni. Amatola also has seven times the proportion of water losses compared with Umgeni and charges 1.6 times the tariff of Umgeni. The ratio model with an undesirable output outperforms previous methods to deal with undesirable (bad) outputs, which either provide an over- or underestimation of technical efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries in the world, including South Africa, are water-stressed with increasing pressure on their water resources due to population growth, climate change, and inadequate funding. Post-independence in 1994, many policies and programmes were introduced by the government with the aim of promoting water management. While these policies and strategies achieved much in terms of water provision to communities and households, they failed to establish a water-conscious country with sufficient knowledge and expertise in water management. In addition, these policies and programmes are outdated, compartmentalised, complex, and lack robust water governance with resilient stakeholder partnerships that advance the more explicit second phase of the National Development Plan (NDP) to achieve water security under the threat of climate change. Using data collection tools inspired by the traditional method of participatory research, this paper analyses the structural and systematic factors hindering the implementation of comprehensive policies to achievewater security in South Africa. There is, therefore, an urgent need for SouthAfrica to establish an independent water regulator to ensure coordination between different government departments, including the National Treasury, to strengthen weak governance capacity and to make it independent to attract private equity into the sector and to recover fiscal deficits in the water sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]